Inside Graham & Green’s Made-to-Measure Mobile Commerce Experience
Home & Garden eCommerce
The British furniture company created a beautiful mobile-optimized website, and doubled conversion rates.
A unique eCommerce platform for a unique business
On Easter Monday in 1974, the first Graham & Green store opened its doors in Notting Hill, England. The store’s owner was Antonia Graham, who loved to travel the world looking for exotic and eclectic furniture, rugs and home accessories. With her hip furniture business, Graham launched the first ‘lifestyle’ brand to import into the UK various homewares from India, Morocco, and Continental Europe. The business allowed Graham to be truly independent, working directly with traders to forge her own path, and support her family. In 1980, Graham & Green launched their first mail order catalogue, and in 1999, Graham’s son, Jamie, built their first eCommerce website.
After transitioning into making furniture to order, it became important for Graham & Green to have a totally custom-made eCommerce platform too. For years they ran their eCommerce operation on Magento Commerce 1, but as the digital world and their customers’ needs changed, in 2018 they started to plan a digital transformation. Firstly, their webstore was not responsive, and worked poorly on mobile devices. But most importantly, they needed to create a bespoke customer journey for ordering Made-to-Order (MTO) products like custom sofas. They decided to upgrade to Magento Commerce 2.
Magento has a combination of stability, great partnerships with technology companies, focus on conversion, and second-to-none user experience, making it the merchants’ platform.
Gareth Irvine
eCommerce Director, Graham & Green
A bespoke mobile commerce experience
Together with their solution partner, JH, Graham & Green started to create their made-to-measure platform. JH kicked off a thorough discovery process with UX research, collaborating with Graham & Green’s internal designers. A rigorous design process considered each mobile page design individually, instead of a responsive skin that applies to an existing desktop-only site. The result was a beautiful, intuitive mobile commerce experience.
On the backend, JH used Cindercone Magma as a third-party connector to integrate the Magento Commerce 2 site with Graham & Green’s Microsoft Navision ERP system. They connected Dynamics NAV as a fully factored two-way integration that allows Graham & Green to enjoy automated, reliable dataflows with unrivaled visibility across stock, product data, customers, orders, and shipments. Meanwhile, JH took advantage of the platform’s built-in JavaScript framework to create back-end REST APIs that deliver interactive user-facing features, and a smoother, faster experience.
The most important part of the new site is a stunning product configurator that allows customers to order their own MTO sofa. Visitors to the webstore can choose a sofa style from the Miami collection, for example, then select a size and shape, before choosing the material and color. After making their selections, customers can visualize their final design in beautiful computer-generated imagery (CGI), to help them make their buying decision. A “complete the look” feature allows them to add subsequent matching items, like footstools and armchairs, with a single click.
Graham & Green added Braintree for payments, with PayPal rolled in, reducing any friction from the mobile transaction process. Magento Commerce 2 also comes with an improved two-step checkout process out-of-the-box, delivering an easy-to-use guest checkout, with no login required. JH also implemented a number of popular third-party extensions to improve the performance of the store: they used Klevu search technology to help customers find the right product, faster; they integrated Feefo reviews on product pages to boost consumer confidence; and Nosto recommendations cleverly suggest other products, boosting Average Order Value (AOV).
Meanwhile, Graham & Green added a waiting list for out-of-stock products, and a numerical “stock status” value, so customers can see when products, such as the Beaumont Bone Inlay Chest of Drawers, are running out. Finally, they added a custom marketing capture that grabs email, catalogue, and third-party permissions at various points in the customer journey — valuable for marketing campaigns and offers.
A faster, smoother eCommerce website
The first Graham & Green mobile site launched on October 15, 2018, in time for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales season. They reported that the mobile-first platform really made a difference to the business. The site speed alone has revolutionized the entire experience — thanks to Magento, average page load times are down a staggering 43.5 percent year-over-year, making the buying experience lightning fast.
The made-to-measure product configurator has generated a year-over-year uplift of 100 percent in Sofas, and overall, Graham & Green has almost doubled conversion rates across desktop, mobile, and tablet. Overall, conversion rates have increased by 96.46 percent, delivering a superior return on investment on a webstore that was custom made to their specifications.
Other Popular eCommerce Articles
How Material Bank Created an Innovative B2B Experience
Originally published at https://magento.com.
